Looking back at 47 years with Coborn's

Bob Thueringer, who recently retired after 47 years at Coborn's, reflects on the grocery industry and its changes from when he was a bag boy until he left the company as chief operating officer.

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Bob Thueringer, former chief operating officer at Coborn’s, talks June 25 about retiring from the company after a 47-year career that started as a bag boy in 1967.(Photo: Jason Wachter, jwachter@stcloudtimes.com)Buy Photo

For almost five decades, nothing changed and everything changed for Bob Thueringer.

He recently cleaned out his office, retiring after 47 years with Coborn's. He served in just about every capacity between bag boy — where he started in 1967 — to chief operating officer, his title since 1999.

One of the items he handled as he prepared to leave company headquarters was a small rock monument, given to him by a mentor, which had been on his desk for several decades. Inscribed, it said simply, "Remember this: When you're through changing ... you're through."

At 63, Thueringer is still healthy and hearty and has plenty of plans for retirement, including a host of volunteer opportunities. He's by no means "through." That saying was a touchstone for him, however, as he compiled one of the longest and highest-profile tenures of anyone in area business circles whose title didn't include founder or owner.

"The acceleration of change and pace over the years — from 1967, to '77 to '87, '97 and 2007 — was very noticeable in the frequency of the challenges," Thueringer said.

His career has paralleled an evolution in the grocery industry. After all that exposure to change, Thueringer can even give a glimpse of what we may see in the future.

The 1960s

Thueringer grew up in Sauk Rapids, attended Sacred Heart Elementary, Cathedral High School and St. Cloud State University. He went on his only real employment search as a 16-year-old, landing a job at the Sauk Rapids Coborn's, where Czarnetzki Hardware Hank is today. His exposure to the grocery industry started even earlier, however.

"My brother and I used to peddle vegetables out of a little coaster wagon," said Thueringer, who came from a family of eight children. "We had a huge garden. We had to weed it, and my mother would pick vegetables and package them. And our job, before going to play Little League baseball, was to go up and down the street and sell from door to door. She was the bookkeeper and kept a ledger for us. We accumulated money in an account, and it was used to buy clothes when we went back to school or go to the church bazaar and that kind of stuff. It was a good lesson in discipline. Once I remember we each kept back a nickel, thinking we could go buy some penny candy. She said, 'Cough up the rest of the money. You're short.' So I learned about inventory control right there."

The Sauk Rapids Coborn's in 1967 had a small backroom storage area but a large basement. Deliveries were distributed on rollers through a window chute, sorted and stored or brought up on a freight elevator to go on display. Orders were handwritten and filled by phone from a catalog.

Thueringer said the store couldn't have covered more than 20,000 square feet and totaled six aisles of items.

"There was nowhere near the variety that you see today," said Thueringer, whose brother, Tim, retired in 2010 after a long career as Coborn's director of produce.

Frozen pizza hadn't materialized, though TV dinners were popular. Fresh produce also became available at different seasons, triggering a customer rush — especially on fruits for home canning after they were delivered by the train car. Bob Thueringer said the store carried 50-pound bags of flour. Today, with the proliferation of ready-made cake mixes and similar products, a 5-pound bag is most common. And, just as gas stations offered full service at the time, grocery stores took similar steps to cater to their customers.

"Not only did we have baggers at the front of the store, you also interacted with people in the store," said Thueringer, who wore a bow tie, white shirt and an apron as a bag boy. "We would carry out the groceries. It didn't matter if they wanted it or not, you carried the groceries out. ... You didn't accept a tip, and you were polite, closed their door gently and all of those things."

The 1970s

Thueringer used his job at Coborn's to work his way through high school and college. In 1974, the company built a new store — the second of three generations of Coborn's in Sauk Rapids. That's where he eventually had his first office.

"That introduced a generational change," said Thueringer, who became the company's first personnel operations manager, duties that today might be called human resources. "That store was kind of a showplace, and it was one of the first like that in the state that had its own in-store bakery. That was somewhat revolutionary at the time, and it was part of the evolution of the grocery store. It also had a deli."

There were just three Coborn's then, with one on Fifth Avenue in St. Cloud and another in Foley. In addition to staffing those stores, he introduced employee evaluation forms and wage scales.

"One of my first projects out of college was to develop a labor scheduling system," Thueringer said.

"We still used the old cash registers, those big metallic boat-anchor things. We tracked the sales by hour to see what the pattern was and predict when you needed staff. But it was a challenge because you had to take all of these individual cash register readings every hour. And you had to add them up and subtract one cumulative total from another. When we graduated to electronic cash registers, it was a quantum leap."

The move to a UPC system and eventually optical scanning was an immeasurable change.

"We went from a price-marking process with sticks and stamps and labels to opening our first scanning store in 1979 in Willmar," Thueringer said. "It was our first Cash Wise store, and we were the second store in Minnesota to introduce scanning. The first was a Red Owl store in the Twin Cities. We recognized the importance of it. If we were going to be viable and stay ahead of our competition, we needed it. And we thought it would revolutionize the industry."

The technology allowed grocers to track individual items and more easily control product pricing.

The 1980s

The next decade saw an expansion of store offerings and hours. Grocery stores became more of a one-stop shop for customers.

"The thought process started in the '70s but blossomed in the 1980s," Thueringer said.

Coborn's branched out with liquor stores, convenience stores and other services. Thueringer said a lot of that evolution came from lifestyles that continually seemed to adopt a faster pace.

"We saw a need for our time-starved customers, and so we started extending our hours until we eventually became a 24-hour operation (by 1982)," Thueringer said. "It wasn't always to the liking of some of the people in the stores because they had to go through the discomfort of working different hours. It was a challenge to find employees, too."

Other services grocery stores began to merge with the shopping experience included video stores, postal services, dry cleaning and banking.

The 1990s

By the 1990s, Coborn's had gone to put a drug store in most of its grocery operations.

"It was a bit of a risk because you had to operate it for several years before you were going to show any profitability," Thueringer said. "But if I ever made an impassioned pitch to do something, that was it ... and it turned out to be one of the big changes for the '90s, because as people developed a relationship with a pharmacist, they were more likely to buy groceries there, too."

Thueringer said video rental and photo developing were strong parts of the business in the 1990s. Ironically, those also are examples of how rapid change affects the industry. Digital photography has almost wiped out film images, and Coborn's is in the middle of a five-year plan to exit the video rental business — now dominated by online, cable and satellite streaming services — and replace those spaces with coffee shops.

A couple of concepts that have stuck from the 1990s include a natural foods section and the concept of adding eating space to deli areas.

"By that time, ready-made meals that you could pick up and take home was the talk of the industry," Thueringer said. "Adding seating was an extension of that. And in some of these stores, it has become a community gathering point. It's not necessarily profitable, but it makes the atmosphere more enjoyable."

2000 and beyond

The turn of the millennium brought about extreme changes in how a grocery business communicates with its customers.

"Our customers could start placing orders from their computer that would be filled at the brick-and-mortar store," Thueringer said. "That experience and the interaction on social media have increased our sensitivity to the consumer ... the reality is the next generation of consumers is going to be much more reliant on access through social media, to find out what's available and to read what their friends say about it."

Thueringer will remain on the board of directors at Coborn's, which has grown to include more than 120 retail locations and 7,000 employees during his tenure. While he won't be involved in the day-to-day operations, he says changing populations will require food manufacturers to be more sensitive to what they offer to customers.

"People are more aware of things like gluten, I think those (concerns) will continue to evolve," he said. "And the solutions to a family meal will continue to change. We've talked about the days when you baked your own bread to today where you can take something home that is much easier to prepare. People in this industry have to be very conscious of how to meet those needs.

"I also think the way people shop in stores is going to change over time," Thueringer added. "The lineal dimensions that you see in a grocery store will continue to break down. We're already seeing less demand for some of the center-store, tin-can type items. People are going to meal solutions, where the ingredients are added. The perimeter of the store will evolve to provide more of those. I could see a store changing to where there is a breakfast section in the center of the store, where you'd have peanut butter and jelly and toast and muffins and eggs and all of those things in one area. It's kind of far out, but I think you'll see a breakdown of the traditional grocery store aisles over the next 30 years."